Extra Blog: Images of Brazilian Teachers

My group and I discussed the meat and potatoes of this article at length already, but I'll go through it again with my own voice and see if I can't discover something new about it or myself. The article was about taking a timed snapshot of teachers in Brazil after Freire's idea of critical pedagogy was made nationally required for every teacher. The picture that was provided was far different than anyone expected. The study looked at 40 teachers of various academic levels who all, in some fashion, worked in the teaching of English as Brazilians teaching this language rather than some native speaker. The unexpected image of this snapshot was that hardly any of these teachers were familiar with critical pedagogy; I say this in past tense because this study was conducted in 1999, two years after the national implementation of critical pedagogy as a requirement in '97.

The crazy thing about this (beyond the fact that Freire's a Brazilian and the idea of critical pedagogy is progressive and, consequently, one would think it would be emphasized in his home country) is that not only were these educators unfamiliar with critical pedagogy, but most hadn't even heard of it! Of the 40 who were interviewed and tested, only 2 had a realistic idea of the workings of critical pedagogy, while another minority (albeit a larger one that the 2 that knew what was going on) understood the theory incorrectly. That's like Brazil hosting the World Cup and going down in the first round to Moonanites; it just shouldn't be the case. My group and I discussed the potential reasons for this; we felt that because the critical pedagogy theory was only implemented on a nationally required stage 2 years before the study that several of these teachers were not trained in this idea. We also assumed, whether for better or worse, that the teachers that had absolutely no idea were the older teachers while the younger teachers were a little more familiar. The youngest were the 2 with the working knowledge of the theory. We had no evidence of this as the study didn't specify ages (which we thought it would be helpful if it did), but it just seemed to be a logical step.

What we know: As of 1999, Brazil had a long way to go before becoming the progressive ideal of education that their own theorist, Paulo Freire, imagined. I'd like to see a study done today asking these very questions, albeit with some more information about those being featured in the study, to get a better idea of the impact of critical pedagogy on Brazilian education. As far as the prompt questions are concerned, this doesn't implicate critical pedagogy all that critically; it simply speaks to a time when the norm was a changing entity.